By Gary Null
It is my opinion that vitamin C is the universal necessary nutrient.
Go back to 1747, when a British naval surgeon named James Lind offered citrus fruit to 12 men suffering from scurvy on the HMS Salisbury. Historically, scurvy was frequently fatal, especially for those who were at sea for months at a time where there were no fresh fruits or vegetables and they were vitamin C deficient. To everyone’s surprise, all 12 men recovered quickly. It would not be for another 50 years in 1795 when a British physician, Gilbert Blane, argued to the admiralty that they must now include citrus juice as a part of the daily ration on every British ship. Once again, to everyone’s surprise, the scurvy scourge vanished.
But it was not until 1932 that a respected British chemist named Walter Haworth was able to identify the molecular structure of hexuronic acid, an organic reducing agent found in plants and animal tissue. He named it ascorbic acid. Today, it is known as simply vitamin C.
At the same time Haworth was identifying vitamin C, independent of him, Albert Szent Gyorgyi discovered vitamin C. The next year, the Swiss laboratory synthesized ascorbic acid identical to vitamin C, and it began to be produced in the general population in 1935. In 1937, in honor of the two great scientists’ work on vitamin C, they both received the Nobel Prize: Albert Szent Gyorgyi for discovering vitamin C and Haworth for his work with vitamin C and carbohydrates.
In 1970, Linus Pauling’s publication of “Vitamin C and the Common Cold” became a bestseller. It was Pauling, a highly-respected scientist who had won two unshared Nobel Prizes, who stated that we need a minimum of 3 grams or 3,000 mg a day of vitamin C to prevent the common cold.
It was at this time also that Linus Pauling met a Canadian physician, Dr. Abram Hoffer, MD, Ph.D. Hoffer had been working with vitamins and published the first work showing that high levels of vitamin C could help people with schizophrenia. He met with Pauling and that was the beginning of the orthomolecular medicine movement.
In 1971, Pauling began work with Dr. Ewen Cameron, a respected Scottish physician and scientist who was using intravenous vitamin C to treat terminal cancer patients. He used doses of 10,000 mg and was getting positive results. The treatments did not cure anyone, but patients’ lives were substantially prolonged and improved.
In the early 1980s, the Mayo Clinic conducted studies with the intent of discrediting Pauling’s cancer findings. The study was horribly inaccurate because it failed to follow Pauling’s protocol. The Mayo Clinic used oral supplements, not intravenous. Pauling personally called me and told me this study was a fraud. In fact, he came on my radio program in the early 1970s to discuss increasing oral vitamin C to 18,000 mg per day if you had a cold, the flu, or cancer.
In the late 1980s, Linus Pauling found the role of vitamin C along with lysine to prevent atherosclerosis and relieve angina pectoris. It became known as the Pauling Therapy for treating heart disease. From my experience, I developed what I called the laws of compensation, which meant to the degree you have any physical or mental imbalance, trauma, virus, bacteria, parasite, or any other pathogen – nutritional deficiency, genetic predisposition, illness – you must exceed the level of that imbalance to correct it. So I began to encourage the people I was working with on a daily basis (starting as early as 1968) to take 10,000 mg in divided doses of a buffered vitamin C.
Linus Pauling was ridiculed and vilified by the medical establishment. In private conversations with me at the Institute of Applied Biology, where I was a research fellow for 33 years in anti-aging medicine, nutrition, and lifestyle, he told me he could not believe how powerful the pharmaceutical industry and the medical-industrial complex were in preventing quality information from being disseminated. He told me they acted more like organized crime than the healing profession. He was saddened. But he was a realist. It was because of Pauling that many of the doctors who were not succeeding as they’d hoped began to use vitamin C in treating their patients.
The people who are the most critical of vitamin C would have you think there is no evidence supporting its usage. For those of us who are seeing patients, conducting studies, publishing peer-reviewed literature, and respecting the outstanding contributions of thousands of researchers to the peer-reviewed literature, we have one statement. Until you do your own homework and save lives, being an uneducated, misinformed, ideologically-minded skeptic should not hold the same weight as the 61,707 studies that are published in the government’s medical database.
